14 Words by Email

Thursday, 23 February 2012

The ruling, made last November but released on Thursday, stems from a
case brought in the eastern German state of Thuringia, where an
82-year-old man walked into a pub and began complaining about a
documentary on World War II that was running on a TV there.

He questioned what he called the “lies” about the origins of the war,
and the role that Jews supposedly played in altering the historical
record afterwards.

He then returned two days later, began another argument and gave the
landlord several neo-Nazi pamphlets. One of these, entitled “The
historical lie of the so-called attack on Poland in 1939,” claimed that
no gas chambers were used in the Third Reich.

The landlord kept the fascist pamphlets and later pressed charges
against the man, who was convicted of hate crime through distributing
literature in two Thuringia courts in June 2006 and April 2007. The man –
who believed his freedom of speech had been violated – then appealed to
the constitutional court, who ruled in his favour.

Germany’s highest court, based in the western town of Karlsruhe, said
that the man’s arguments counted as freedom of speech, and were thus
protected by article five of the German constitution. The ruling also
said the man, who one judge described as “even today a zealous proponent
of National Socialist ideology and historical forgery,” had not
committed hate crimes, because he had only passed on the literature to
one other person.

“Even the dissemination of National Socialist ideas as a radical
questioning of the status quo” is not necessarily outside the protection
of article five, the court said.

Holocaust denial remains illegal in Germany, the court underlined,
saying the Holocaust was “a historically-proven fact that normally does
not come under the protection of the freedom of speech.”

But the court decided that this was not the decisive point of the man’s
arguments. He was simply using the denial as an “introductory attempt at
an explanation” to deny Germany’s guilt for World War II in general.

Some critics do see Germany’s law on Holocaust denial as a threat to the
freedom of speech, but the court expressly said that this ruling in no
way affected that law.